Impressions of England 60

Impressions of England 60

At a later hour, the same evening, it was my lot to preach in St.

Bartholomew’s, Moor-lane, in the pulpit once filled by the worthy

Archbishop Sharpe. The incumbent of this Church had lately discovered at

Sion College a collection of papers and books once belonging to the

saintly Bishop Wilson; and he placed in my hands, for that evening, the

original _Sacra Privata_ of that holy and venerable prelate. I could not

but think how much we may owe it to his prayers, that the Church of

England is now what she is, as compared with what she was in his day;

and, in preaching, I took great delight in paying a parting tribute to

that Church, as compared with the churches of the continent.

 

I am convinced that the debt which England and the world owe to the

Anglican Reformers of the sixteenth century, has never been properly

appreciated. Like the air which we breathe, but do not perceive, the

spirit with which they have invested the religion of England, is that of

life and health. They banished nothing but the fogs and noxious

exhalations of the middle ages; and, as the result, we find England hale

and hearty, and bearing more fruit in her age, while the churches which

allowed the Tridentine vapours to become their atmosphere, are perishing

in the agues and fevers of a long and ghastly decline. Look at Spain and

Italy!

 

And I cannot forbear, in conclusion, to remark, that when American

travellers go to England, and copy the false statistics of some infidel

almanac, to justify their railings against the National Church, they are

about as wise as John Bull is, when he takes the statistics of our

(immigrant) pauperism and crime, as a test of the true state of American

society. It is true that there are great abuses connected with the

establishment; and it is also true that they are deplored by no class of

Englishmen, half so much as they are by the true churchman. If the

Church could be left to herself, they would be immediately reformed; but

the very creatures who rail at her, because of them, are they who refuse

to give her the freedom which she claims, and who do the most to enslave

her to the State power. I am no friend to that power in the Church of

God; but they who prate against the church, because of her misfortunes,

deserve the rebuke of all thinking men, whose knowledge of history, and

of the existing state of the world, enables them to compare what has

been done for England, by that church, even in her fetters, with what

all other religions put together have done for the residue of the world.

When we reflect upon the three great achievements of that Church for

English liberty—the Reformation, the Restoration of the Constitution

and Monarchy, and the repudiation of the Popish Stuarts, we may well

afford to laugh at such sneers as a Macaulay endeavours to raise against

her, on the ground of blemishes with which his own reckless and

treacherous political allies have deformed and afflicted her. And when

we attempt to estimate the blessings she has diffused through the whole

Anglo-Saxon people, and by them through the world, who can refrain from

blessing the dear Church which has placed the English Bible in every

cottage, and which, for three centuries, has read the _Ten

Commandments_, every Lord’s day, in the ears of millions of the people?

It is only when we think of what that Church has done, in spite of the

golden chains which fetter her, and in spite of the political miscreants

who have always hung like hounds upon her heels and hands, that we can

rightly estimate her strong vitality, and her vast beneficence.

 

And let it be remembered, too, that all that is good among English

dissenters, is sucked from the Church, as the parasite derives its

nourishment from the oak. The dissenters are mainly the small-tradesmen

of England, a people intelligent enough to perceive the faults of their

hereditary religion, but not generally enlightened enough to know its

value and its services to themselves. They are like the Dutch boors, who

thought the sun did no good among the Flemings, because they saw it so

seldom, and who concluded that daylight came from the clouds, which were

always visible. Whoever will take the pains to contrast the dissenters

of England with those of Germany, will learn how much even they derive

from the Church, against which they so ignorantly rail.

 

I desire to speak with great respect of many of the dissenters of

England, who, like their estimable Doddridge, are such by the force of

circumstances only, while they love and revere the Church of the nation;

but I have known even American Presbyterians to experience the greatest

revulsion of feeling against the mass of English dissenters, after

actual contact with their coarse and semi-political religionism. I was

not less surprised than gratified, moreover, to observe very lately, in

a widely circulated American newspaper, edited by eminent Presbyterians,

a full vindication of the Church of England from the odious and false

views current among us in America, with respect to the system of tithes.

The writer was himself an English or Irish dissenter, and he frankly

asserted the fact, that in paying his tithes, he suffered no wrong, and

contributed nothing to the establishment, which did not belong to her.

“In short,” said he, “the Church owns one-tenth of my rent, and I am

quite as willing to pay it to her, as to pay the nine-tenths to my other

landlord.” The nine-tenths might go to a popish priest; but does he who

pays it contribute to uphold Popery? No more than one who hires his

house of a play-actor, supports the stage.

 

But although the decline of dissent, in England, is universally

admitted, it is generally imagined that Popery is growing. So it is if

the immigration from Ireland, of thousands of _navvies_, who have built

Romish chapels and convents, out of their earnings on the railways, be

the basis of the remark. But nothing was ever more over-rated than the

late Apostacy, which is the fruit of a mere personal influence, over a

few young men at Oxford, gained by one brilliant sophist, and

perniciously directed by him towards ultramontane Romanism. It has spent

itself already in a spasmodic revolt against common sense, which is

breeding a reaction towards rationalism: but the Church of England is as

much in danger from Irvingism as from Newmanism; and Wesleyanism was

vastly more energetic against her than either. The chagrin and

disappointment of Mr. Newman himself is most apparent. After numbering

the “educated men” whom he had involved in his own downfall as _a

hundred_, he confesses that their defection from the Church has scarcely

been felt by her. “The huge creature from which they went forth,” he

says, “showed no consciousness of its loss, but _shook itself, and went

about its work as of old time_.” Yes, but with a newer and mightier

energy than ever before, and that in both hemispheres. The unhappy man

seems to have imagined that by getting into a balloon, he could kick the

earth from its orbit: but the planet still revolves around the sun,

while he dangles in the air, lost in the brilliant clouds of his own

imaginations, and fancying his petty elevation as sublime as her pathway

through the skies.

 

In the same manner, the Dublin reviewers are continually deploring their

powerless expenditure of vast resources against the religion of England,

which stands in its fortress of scriptural truth, more impregnable than

Gibraltar. Let the reader reflect, for a minute, on the essential

characteristic of the Anglican Reformation, as it began under Wycliff,

in a _translation of the scriptures_, and then weigh the importance of

the following citation from a Romish periodical.

 

“Who will not say,” says the _Dublin Review_, “that the uncommon beauty

and marvellous English of the Bible is not one of the great strongholds

of heresy in this country. It lives on the ear like a music that can

never be forgotten, like the sound of the church-bell, _which the

convert hardly knows how he can forego_. Its felicities often seem to be

almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind,

and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes

into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its

verses. The power of all the gifts and trials of a man is hidden beneath

its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that

there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent,

and good, speaks to him forever out of the English Bible. It is his

sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never

soiled. In the length and breadth of the land, there is not a Protestant

with one spark of righteousness about him, whose spiritual biography is

not in his Saxon Bible.”

 

Action and reaction are always equal; and it is my own opinion that the

hand of God is visible in the permission of the late scandals, and their

sequel will demonstrate that He has been infusing into modern Romanism a

spirit which will blow it to atoms. Among the beardless boys, who have

swelled the numerical strength of the apostacy, there are some prodigals

who will yet come to themselves, and remember their father’s house with

penitent tears: and as to their leaders, the ex-Jesuit Steinmetz in his

narrative of a residence at Stoneyhurst, introduces the following

striking view of the case, which sustains my own impressions. “Though

the men of Rome,” he says, “exult in this reaction (as they call it)

which is making Oscott a _refugium peccatorum_, perhaps from among the

very men whose captive chains clank in their triumphal thanksgiving,

there will be shot the _lethalis arundo_, the deadly arrow that will

pierce and cling to the side of their mother church in the appointed

time. It is not children that they are receiving; but full-grown men,

accustomed most pertinaciously to think for themselves. They began with

being reformers, and it must be confessed with some of the boldness of

reformers. Will they be content to change their skins? To become sheep,

from having been, as it were, wolves? To smother the cunning and the

clever thought, which seems so flattering to one’s own vanity, in the

cold, dead ashes of papal infallibility? _We shall see._” This is

reasonable, and consoling. We may not live to see it; but a rebellion

against Truth must have its rebound, and Church and State will be

stronger for such rebellions in the end.

 

If then, the decline of English arts and arms be near, of which I am by

no means as confident as some, it will be a very slow decline, and

coincident with a new glory, and a brighter one, than England yet has

known. Instead of armies, she is now sending forth soldiers of the

Prince of Peace. She has discovered that it is cheaper and wiser to

sustain missionaries than bayonets. The era of her greatest work is

before her. She is to become the nursing mother of nations, and in her

language, the sound of the Gospel is to go forth into all lands, and

unto the end of the world. Hers is the deposit of the faith once

delivered to the saints. The Roman Churches have divorced themselves

from the promises, and in the Catholicity of England chiefly is

fulfilled the promise of Christ, to be always with His own Apostolic

commission, even to the end of the world. At the same time, there is a

moral life in English society, which must long salt the State, and

preserve it from decay. I appeal to the common sense of Christian men,

and I ask, in what other country under heaven is there such a mass of

domestic and social purity? Where else is there so large a benevolence,

so masculine a religion, so enlightened a conscience, among any people?

England has her shame as well as her glory; she is part and parcel of a

sinful world; but her light is not hid under a bushel: and if the hope